Contemporary accounts about metropolitan cities in India alternate on the one hand between high dreams such as Mumbai as second Shanghai, Bangalore world’s Knowledge City, the new Detroit in Chennai, IT capital in Hyderabad and the Gateway to the East in Kolkata, and on the other, grim accounts about the crumbling infrastructure, poor connectivity and rising costs of urban land and shelter in these cities. While generalised accounts about India’s urbanisation are many, the mega cities of India have not been a frequent subject of study. For the first time the CPR, as an independent and leading policy think-tank in the country, had been engaged in a study of these five cities over the past one year. The workshop on Governance of Megacity Regions was organised in collaboration with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Mumbai First and Rockefeller Foundation in Mumbai’s historic Taj Mahal hotel on the 4th and 5th February 2013. With the CPR report on the Megacity Region providing the befitting background, the conference brought together key government officials and scholars from these five cities, selected Members of Parliament, elected municipal leaders, representatives of business and industry as well as internationally renowned experts from other metropolitan cities. The report titled “Governance of India’s Megacities: Needed Transformation’, is funded by the Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India, and aims at identifying the metropolitan level problems faced by these city regions and building a wider consensus about the new directions and possibilities in restructuring the governance systems in these regions in order to address present and future challenges. The study has tried to identify the critical issues which need to be addressed at the metropolitan or city regional level which will go by default otherwise. Its purpose is to suggest an organisational framework for the governance of these big city regions underlining the fact that they require the participation of multiple stakeholders like the national and provincial governments, city governments, business and industry, the expanding numbers of elected political representatives, civil society and others.

This comparative study is based on an extensive review of the spatial, demographic and economic features of the five mega city regions, namely, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangaluru and Hyderabad. It proceeds to assess the present situation in regard to provision of services such as water supply, drainage and sanitation, the extent of metropolitan wide coverage, the institutional matrix and its evolution. It reviews the changes in spatial development, transport connectivity in the metropolitan area, the challenges of socio- economic growth and employment and the electoral geography in the city regions. The review of the existing municipal, parastatal and other institutions ostensibly responsible for various aspects of the city regions and possible approaches towards a future framework are a principal focus of the study. The study also looks critically at an important provision of the 74th Amendment to the Constitution which among other things has envisaged a Metropolitan Planning Committee for large cities.